Tiny House triumphs with `Tragedy'

July 29, 2002|By Chris Jones, Tribune arts reporter.

Once in a very great while, a hitherto unknown little Chicago theater company will create a low-budget production that's so vibrant, so smart, so original, so creative and so thoroughly invigorating that one wants to shout its glories from high above the rooftops without any visible wires.

"The Terrible Tragedy of Peter Pan" is such a show. If the 1-year-old House Theatre Company does not quickly become a major force in the off-Loop world, then you can feed my writing hand to a crocodile. One can say this, at least: An ensemble with this level of talent has an opportunity in this nurturing theatrical city they could only squander themselves.

The House is composed of theater artists in their 20s. These youngsters made 2 intermissionless hours in the steamy Viaduct Theatre pass quicker than Mary Martin making one pass over the stage. Aside from some overexuberance ascribable to the infelicitousness of youth, one has to struggle very hard to find any serious flaws here -- the acting, direction, design and, most of all, the writing are all superb.

J. M. Barrie's famous 1904 tale of Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, is fertile ground for post-modern exploration. Even though Disney sanitized the script for family consumption and turned it into an indefatigable vehicle for Broadway stars and former Olympic gymnasts, "Peter Pan" originally was a very complicated text.

There's the issue of whether it flowed from an inappropriately intimate relationship between Barrie and his wards, the five Llewelyn Davies brothers (the models for Peter and the Lost Boys). Barrie's defenders declare the author's innocence; a recent BBC documentary suggested otherwise.

Either way, the character of Wendy Darling sure is a weird mix of mother and love object.

And what about that famous line about a fairy dying if we say we don't believe? The stuff of my childhood nightmares, even the playwright Christopher Durang could see the downside of making children want to clap until their hands bleed.

Phillip C. Klapperich, the 24-year-old company member who wrote this remarkable adult play, somehow manages to dissect many of these issues without actually parodying the original script.

There is some fun at the expense of the popular Peter Pan tropes, but this is mainly a deep and often moving exploration of the boundaries of a story about the dark side of childhood that long has etched itself into our minds. We're pulled in and out of Barrie's disturbing world, as if on the end of a wire.

Director Nathan Allan, clearly a big talent, matches this script by ensuring his actors perform with the kind of manic youthful intensity one associates with England's Theatre de Complicite.

With the audience directly engaged, the stakes of the show become so high that you find yourself sitting bolt upright all night long, terrified of missing something.

In the lead role of Peter, the boyish and bespectacled Stephen Taylor superbly captures the agony of becoming adult. He's an empathetic well. Lauren Vitz's foul-mouthed Tinkerbell is a fearless piece of performing. So is Maria McCullough's fighting Tiger Lily. And Carolyn Defrin's Wendy is just the right blend of sweetness and strangeness.

If that weren't enough, there are sparking visuals from Tiffany Williams, magic effects, remarkable fight work, and startling musical composition from Peter Waldman. The blend of fancy and reality, puppets and real pain would feel like a stylistic mishmash in other hands. Not here.